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The reaction to Ron Paul’s Congressional farewell address: what does it mean?

Congressman Ron Paul gave a farewell speech to Congress on November 14th, 2012 and I encourage you to watch it in full or read the transcript at the link. If the US Empire were to follow his advice it would truly be a passing from the old age to a new one and would thus prove the Mayan Calendar theorists right. It would be a return to freedom and liberty and a renunciation of war.

Since Dr. Ron Paul was known in congress as “Dr. No” and never had any real power or prestige in congress; why have so many people taken note of the speech and still want to know what this retiring politician has to say? I got almost four million hits with a Google search on Ron Paul’s farewell address just now. That is amazing.

In the history of American politics, I can think of only four farewell addresses that ever got into the textbooks, and one of them was a fake. The most famous one was George Washington’s 1796 farewell address, and it was not an address. It was a newspaper article. The second came in 1961, which was Dwight Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial complex speech. The third one was Richard Nixon’s announcement after his defeat in 1962 when he ran for governor of California against Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. I’m not sure that it should be regarded an address; it was more of a press conference, but it counted as a farewell address . . . for six years. In it, he uttered the immortal words, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” It was aimed at the media. Then, a dozen years later, he gave a real farewell address, the day before he resigned in disgrace from the presidency.

Ron Paul’s farewell address was the fifth. This is extraordinary. The media did not ridicule him as arrogant for having delivered such an address. On the whole, the media seemed interested in what he had to say. Yet his speech began with a statement of the fact, namely, that he had never had any measurable political influence in the House in his entire 22 years. He had never had one of his bills passed into law.

His farewell address was taken seriously as a statement of principles, precisely because he never had any direct political influence in passing legislation. He stood as a representative of a constitutional tradition that has had only two other representatives at the national level ever since the end of the Civil War: President Grover Cleveland and Congressman Howard Buffett, who served in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Virtually nobody remembers Buffett, although almost everybody in the financial world has heard of his son Warren.

Whatever the impact of Ron Paul’s farewell address, it is safe to say that no other congressman has ever delivered such an address at his retirement, at least not where the media took him seriously. It is unheard of that any Congressman would deliver such an address, and especially a Congressman who had no political power or the ability to spread election money around to his colleagues.

The media tried to marginalize Dr. Paul as a “kook” for over 30 years. Why would the media all of a sudden be interested in the words of a retiring Texas Congressman that the media has labeled with almost every smear known to man at one point or the other? Why do even his political enemies even pay attention to Ron Paul’s words?

Until his run for GOP nomination in 2007, Ron Paul was so obscure a figure that the best way for a media representative to reach him was by his home number, and now he leaves office having introduced more ideas into the national debate than any man in memory.

On foreign policy, Dr. Paul, forced the nation to look at the fact that the many wars and policing the whole world has bankrupted the nation financially. He has mentioned at times that the wars have bankrupted us morally and ethically as well, but the financial woes of America due to these massive military aggressions was something that everyone from the far left to the far right knew instinctively that we must talk about as a nation. Dr. Paul made many people aware of this pressing issue.

Dr. Paul Ron showed the nation a way out of wedge issues like abortion or same-sex marriage. He argues, like the Rothbardians have for decades, that we should leave the question of abortion up to the states. Let the people decide state by state. On gay marriage he called for getting the Government totally out of marriage and leaving it up to the people.

Dr. Paul also made very credible pleas to end the failed drug war that is putting millions of peaceful Americans in cages and ruining families over private behaviors. Madness, it is simply madness to try to control what the people ingest into their own bodies. And it costs billions upon billions to pay for the police, the courts, the prisons, and the failed lives of the men and women convicted of the victim-less crime of smoking a little weed or swallowing a pill the government did not approve. The drug war is a total failure.

Ron Paul’s ideas are winning on the financial mess. His “Audit the Fed” message resonates and he made a real call to trim a trillion or more from the budget next year during the campaign. That, of course, scared hell out of both parties. He talked about cutting a Trillion Dollars from the budget in the first year if he won and not ten years down the road after he had left office. Cut spending now was the message.

Ron Paul set the debate and this column by George Will proves it even though Will doesn’t have the decency to mention Ron Paul by name even as he presents many of Dr. Paul’s ideas.

Ron Paul’s ideas are just starting to work. He may be one of the most important “nobodies” ever to be in American politics. I think the reaction to Ron Paul signals that the nation is starting to wake up to the message of peace, prosperity, and liberty that the laissez-faire Classical Liberals have been preaching for generations. Ron Paul got a national platform in the nomination race to be able to tell the masses the truth.

I believe that in the end Ron Paul and the truth will prove to be the real winer of the last election.